Just before the collapse, entrepreneurs worked creatively, and on a small scale.
Set up outside a museum, this man was selling trinkets from the trunk of his car- to people who had some money. Because there was nothing in government stores to buy except things like yellow cabbage and occasionally exotic things like camping spoons, Russian city folk swarmed around businesses like this.
Occasionally they could find something really useful- like toilet paper.

Reminds me of what my people are now living.. scarce of items all around, no toilet paper, little food, all for the sake of having populist commies in power... but then it gets too political for this board

Thanks Steady, Bob, Guari and Douglas.
I was touring the then USSR for about six weeks just before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down- soon to be followed by the government). So I admittedly learned little about the real goings on.
But I kept my eyes and ears open, and our Russian guides told us many truths about life in the Soviet Union. It WAS a period of "Glasnost," when some freedom of speech was possible without the state police visiting you in the middle of the night.
Much of what they said was shocking- I hadn't realized how seriously and badly the Soviet government had been treating its own people. For the past 50+ years!
I hope things are better now (I suspect they are), but I haven't returned since.
Charlie

Charlie Shugart wrote:
Much of what they said was shocking- I hadn't realized how seriously and badly the Soviet government had been treating its own people. For the past 50+ years!
I hope things are better now (I suspect they are), but I haven't returned since.
Charlie

It was, indeed, pretty bad, but I did find that Soviet guides at that time (and later, possibly still) tended/tend to exaggerate quite a bit. It's not all black and white. In some ways, it has gotten much better (stores were full of stuff by the mid-90s), in others (public safety, and other things) it became much worse. Oh, and the government is still pretty horrid to its (generally much more affluent and better fed) people.

I lived in the Soviet Union and then Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, never went back after 2002.

Thanks SK for the input, and glad you like the image.
Even allowing for some exaggerations by the Russian guides, things in the USSR were (and certainly HAD been) shockingly grim to a person like me who had never been afraid of my government.
That's the way it should be for everyone, but about half the world's people have never had that right.
Charlie